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Feminism

Today I received several celebratory emails from friends, announcing the news that Haviva Ner-David, an Orthodox woman living in Jerusalem, had finally achieved her dream of being ordained a rabbi. Her quest began more than ten years ago, when she applied to the rabbinical program at the modern Orthodox Yeshiva University – an application that the administration assumed was a joke and ignored. She went on to pursue rabbinic studies privately with Rabbi Aryeh Strikovsky, an Orthodox rabbi, while also earning a PhD in Talmud – and raising five small children.

Caitlin Flanagan, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has been stirring things up among women for a while now. She’s been writing her controversial views on domestic life since 2001 in magazine articles (she got her writing break with The Atlantic), taking the stance that women should stay at home while raising their kids. “When a mother works, something is lost,” she wrote. She is a self-described “anti-feminist,” who claims she “was virtuously willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her children.”

Tomorrow night, Jews all over the world will sit down for a Passover seder. Some of us will listen to our grandfathers mumble through the hagaddah, and others will incorporate new rituals, like Miriam’s Cup and putting an orange on the seder plate – signs of how feminism has transformed Jewish ritual life.